Many Republicans are angry about losing the election to Biden, not realizing that their perpetual state of belligerence and anger frightens many people away from the GOP (reminding them, among other things, of Hitler’s brownshirts).
It isn’t just their anti-democracy attitude that turns people off. It goes beyond that. It’s things like voter suppression and talk of overthrowing the will of the people by, for example, using gerrymandered legislatures to substitute Trump electors for Biden electors in states Biden won.
The literal language of the Constitution leaves this door open just a crack — enough to make many Democrats nervous. But how realistic a threat to democracy is this? Not very, but not zero.
It would be easier if the Trump party only needed to overturn the election results in one state where the vote was close — something akin to a 2000 election scenario. But this election didn’t turn on a single state, and there’s no state where it’s remotely that close.
An article in Vox published on that date explains why this is next to impossible. (Read it here.) Summarized,
“Now, to start off with the electoral math: Biden leads in states that would give him 306 electoral votes. Of the states he won somewhat narrowly, five — Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Georgia, have Republican-controlled state legislatures. … To deprive Biden of 270 electoral votes, Trump would need to overturn the results in three of these five states. That already makes it less plausible that it would work.
“The next major problem is that all of these states except Georgia have Democratic statewide officials who obviously would not be willing to go along with a plot to steal their state’s electoral votes for Trump.
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- Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania have Democratic governors and secretaries of state.
- Election results in Michigan and Wisconsin are certified by bipartisan boards.
- Arizona has a Democratic secretary of state (but a Republican governor)
- Even in Georgia, Republican secretary of state Brad Raffensperger has so far resisted pressure on the right and said he’s found no significant fraud with the results.
“So … it’s clear that there would be significant resistance among statewide officials to any legislative plan to award electors in states Biden won to Trump.
“Then there is the problem that it’s very far from clear whether state legislatures can legally even do this … [because] the duty of actually certifying the electors in each state falls to state governors (not the legislature) … [and] the Democratic governors in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania … would certify Biden electors …. Meanwhile, Pennsylvania state law quite clearly says that electors are chosen in a popular vote … [and] Wisconsin and Michigan state law also give no role to the legislature in choosing electors. ….
As for the Supreme Court,
“The Constitution gives the role of counting the electoral votes to Congress ….”
And, finally, there’s the potential blowback:
” … if Republican legislators actually tried to steal the election in this way, many people would get very, very upset, and the situation could get very, very ugly. … National Review editor Rich Lowry used the word ‘thermonuclear’ to describe the backlash ….”
The worst outcome for Republicans, of course, would be to attempt this but fail. That would establish them as a totalitarian party that tried to overthrow our democracy, and leave tens of millions of American voters permanently terrified of the word “Republican” and intensely motivated to turn out and vote against them in every future election.
They would be better off, and better serve their own self-interest, to stop talking about it and accept the reality that Biden won this election because a large majority of the American people couldn’t stand the idea of 4 more years of Trump’s lies and hate. Biden’s victory is a one-off, achieved with a never-to-be-repeated coalition, and Republicans have a chance to return to power in 2024 and beyond.
But not if they throw that away by scaring the hell out of the American people by talking and acting like dictators.